George S. Georgiev

Emory Law Associate Professor George S. Georgiev is among a select group of researchers who recently received funding from the Ford Foundation, as part of a far-reaching project on how some of the biggest companies in the United States manage and compensate their employees.

Abigail Disney has called out the Walt Disney Co. for paying its CEO Bob Iger an "insane" $65.6 million, more than 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. "A CEO-to-median pay ratio of 1,424 to 1 is certainly shocking--but such numbers are a shiny decoy," Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev writes for the Los Angeles Times. The op-ed discusses a controversial provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that requires publicly traded companies to report median employee pay and calculate the CEO pay ratio.

Elon Musk has agreed to new social media restrictions in a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission that provides clarity on what the Tesla chief can tweet without prior approval of a lawyer. "The new deal marks the SEC's second attempt at crafting communications rules to check Mr. Musk," who eschews the cautious social media approach employed by most CEOs, the Financial Times reports. The new terms are "much more watertight," Emory Law Assistant Professor George Georgiev said. "The original deal that they struck wasn't very workable."

"The CEO pay ratio rule that was implemented as part of the Dodd-Frank Act mandates that companies disclose the ratio between CEO pay and median employee pay, and while the ostensible purpose was to shine light on compensation-related governance issues, two law professors have concluded that, given the vagueness of the rule's requirements, it serves as little more than 'click bait' to incite emotions," the article reads, citing the study co-authored by Emory Law Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev. "Trusted Professional" is the newspaper of the N.Y. State Society of CPAs.

"Opponents of the CEO pay ratio rule have a new ally: a comprehensive academic analysis that methodically constructs a case for the rule's worthlessness," CFO magazine says of a recent paper co-authored by Emory Law Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev. The paper, the first academic analysis of the pay ratio rule following the first round of reporting, has a chance of influencing changes to the rule, Georgiev said. "I think our proposal is fairly reasonable, so that's what we're hoping for," he says. "You can't stop journalists from looking for a headline, but you can put the numbers in context."

Research by Emory Law Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev was featured in a Bloomberg opinion article on alternative data and the relevance of a new SEC disclosure requirement: CEO pay ratios, or the difference between the CEO's pay and its median employee. Columnist Matt Levine quotes Georgiev's co-authored article: "We suggest that the pay ratio disclosure rule represents a unique approach to disclosure, which we term disclosure-as-soundbite. This approach is characterized by (1) high public salience--the pay ratio is superficially intuitive and resonates with the public to an extent much greater than other disclosure, and (2) low informational integrity--the pay ratio is a relative outlier in terms of certain baseline characteristics of disclosure, meaning that the information is lacking in accuracy, difficult to interpret, and incomplete."

Emory Law professor George Georgiev's research was quoted Bloomberg Opinion in regards to Google failing to disclose that Google+ exposed their users' private profile data. "Since the threshold for what is material increases as firms get bigger, however, at the very largest firms even matters that are significant or sizeable in absolute terms may be deemed immaterial and remain undisclosed," he said.

How much money does YouTube make? It is a secret: Alphabet Inc., which owns YouTube, does not break out revenue for it separately, Bloomberg reports. The story cites Emory Law Professor George S. Georgiev's article "Too Big to Disclose: Firm Size and Materiality Blindspots in Securities Regulation," which shows how large firms legally take advantage of the materiality standard to avoid disclosure of important matters.

Chinese acquisitions of U.S. companies dropped 56 percent in volume to $44.5 billion, dragged down by concerns about U.S. national-security deal reviews and shifts in China's foreign investment policies, Bloomberg reports. Emory Law Professor George Georgiev mentioned the impact of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which evaluates deals that may have national security concerns. "I think CFIUS has always been a wild card," Georgiev said. "When you don't have regulatory certainty, it creates problems."

Uber's recent troubles and ouster of its CEO is not unusual for a Silicon Valley startup. But Uber is no ordinary private start-up. "For Uber to reform itself, the private company needs to behave like a public one." Emory Law Professor George S. Georgiev writes for The Hill.

Clawback policies have become the norm in the U.S., especially at larger companies. Wells Fargo's policy is triggered by financial restatements. The policy allows the bank to recover unvested stock awards where misconduct "might reasonably be expected to" cause "reputational or other harm." Emory Law Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev noted Wells Fargo only acted to enforce its clawback policy after public reaction to the issue became too loud to ignore. "I would favor more oversight by boards over additional complexity in compensation practices," he said. Additional complexity only makes it easier, and creates multiple opportunities, for executives to game the system, he said.

Wells Fargo says it will recover $60 million in stock grants from two top executives in the wake of the phony account-opening scandal. It fired 5,300 employees for opening bogus accounts, returned $2.6 million in improper customer fees and paid a $185 million fine. Those figures pale, though, compared with Wells Fargo's $1.9 trillion in assets and $23 billion in earnings last year. "Even though the fraud was on a massive scale, at the same time, the impact on the bottom line was fairly minimal," said Emory Law Assistant Professor George S. Georgiev. "Often in these borderline cases, you can tell yourself a story as to why something is material or not depending on what you want the outcome to be."